Sosiologisk årbok 1999.1
Types of Consumption – Varieties of
the Aesthetic1
Dag Østerberg
1. Introduction
Consumption is a notion complementary to production, and is
regarded as the ultimate purpose of production. One produces in order
to consume the products, whether directly or
indirectly, by
exchanging them with other products, by virtue of the so-called
division of labour. The means of subsistence must be produced
through work, except for the cases of gathering, hunting and the like.
The human organism needs to be fed, clad and sheltered, on everhigher levels of subsistence. Defining what counts as the necessities of
life, Marx spoke of a moral component of the means of subsistence,
such as the need for recreation etc. (Capital, I, chap. 1). Certainly, this
moral component also contains an aesthetic component. The giving of
form, design, is imperative from the very beginning of the history of
mankind. In other words: The biological needs of the human organism
are the substrate, the facticity, of consumption, a facticity which is
1
This paper is the text of a keynote speach to the Consumption and Aesthetics
Conference, Fredrikstad, Norway, 17-19 August 1997.
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Types of consumption – varieties of the aesthetic
surpassed by a cultural project, a project which varies throughout the
world.
Therefore, it is impossible to deal with consumption in abstraction
from aesthetic concerns, except in extreme cases, such as intravenous
nourishing in hospitals. These cases are
devoid of general
significance.
The topic "consumption and aesthetics" is a vast one, and is dealt with
in widely different ways by the participants of this conference. No
unifying perspective seems to be present. Also, in my own case, I
can identify several types of aesthetics in my thoughts and activities.
A key note, striking the key, has got to be polytonal. In what follows,
I therefore propose to sketch various typical ways in which the
aesthetic permeates or pertains to various types of consumption.
2 Varieties of the aesthetic I: The Kantian/idealist
aesthetics
and realist
Ample support can be given to the following assertion: Post factum,
Kant´s philosophy is the one that best anticipated the institutional
structure of modern liberal (bourgeois) societies, in the sense that
modern institutions embody this philosophy. In the first place, there is
the institution of natural science (mathematical physics, chemistry,
biology etc.) and its implementation as technology and industry, and
the concomitant role of the engineer; this institution corresponds to
the Critique of pure reason.
Next, there is the institution of law and secular morality, and the
concomitant role of the lawyer, the jurist. This corresponds to the
Critique of practical reason and to the Metaphysics of morals.
Third, there is the institution of art and aesthetic experience in the
strict or narrow sense, with the museums, galleries, concert halls etc.,
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Sosiologisk årbok 1999.1
and the concomitant role of the artist. This corresponds to the (first
part of) the Critique of judgement.
Kant asserts that the aesthetic field or institution is subordinate to that
of industry and the legal and moral field. To be sure, art is considered
a good and important thing, but not imperative. It is a field of
edifying illusions, an imaginary realm. It may strengthen one´s
morality and sense of duty, but is not a necessity on a par with the
natural sciences, morals and law. Accordingly, Kant described artistic
activities as particularly suitable for the role of women in our societies,
since art will appeal more to their senses and feelings than to their
faculty of thinking.
Finally, Kant elaborates a double aesthetic: First, there is the doctrine
of our senses or sensibility, which somehow is a condition of our
perception of physical objects in time and space. Here, the aesthetic is
taken in the original Greek sense of aisthesis, of what pertains to the
senses, and deals with it as a substratum of physical knowledge.
Second, there is the doctrine of the aesthetic as concerned with the
beautiful and the sublime, aesthetic experiences which presuppose
that our sensibility is directed away from the world of physical
objects and physical laws, making for a specific kind of aestethic
feeling of desinterested sensuous pleasure, beyond ordinary feelings
of pleasure and desire.
The position of art within our society accords fairly well with Kant´s
structuring of the institutional field. The conference paper Recycling
of classical aesthetic terms within modern advertising 2is a small
confirmation of this: The appeal to the developing of the personality
and so on echoes the belief in the edifying power of art.
2
By Inga Gammel, Center for cultural Reserach, University of Århus, cf. Gammel:
Skønhedens filosofi, Fra Homer til Hugo Boss (trans. The philosophy of beauty), Århus
univ press 1994 (Danish text with English summary).
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Types of consumption – varieties of the aesthetic
Bourdieu put a part of this aesthetic doctrine to the test in Distinction
and elsewhere; the outcome being that Kant was right, but in a
severely limited sense. The Kantian, disinterested aesthetic attitude
can be found in the dominating social classes, whose members are in
an economic position which places them at safe distance from
poverty and economies worries about their material subsistence.
They are at ease. This is a precondition for a detached look at artistic
objects, or a certain detached and distantiating look which in
principle transforms every object into an artistic or aesthetic one. For
the truly aesthetic-minded person, everything in the world can be
apprehended aesthetically. For this reason, modern art and modernism
can only be apprehended by the dominant classes, even if the bulk of
modern art may be rather left-wing in its outlook. Modernism in art
presupposes an autonomy of art with which the dominant classes are
familiar.
Conversely, the dominated social classes do not conform to the
Kantian aesthetic. They have no detached way of looking at the world.
Therefore, theirs is an aesthetics which does not distinguish between
ordinary sensuous pleasure and aesthetic pleasure, and which Kant
therefore considers "vulgar". On the contrary, they want paintings or
photographs of beautiful landscapes hanging on the walls at home,
because they make the home more pleasant, or remind of pleasant
possibilities outside; or paintings and pictures of attractive young
women, evoking the pleasures of sexual life. This aesthetic attitude
Bourdieu imputes to their habitus, stemming from a situation of need
and necessity. Modern, autonomous art is foreign to this kind of
aesthetic habitus.
Most important for our present concerns, Bourdieu extends his
investigations of the distinguished and the vulgar to encompass not
only the field of art, but the whole field of consumption. In a highly
inventive way, he endeavours to demonstrate that the detached
aesthetic attitude is at work also in the sphere of daily consumption,
and likewise the aesthetic of material need and worry. Thus, the
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Sosiologisk årbok 1999.1
majority of the population, the "people" or what Bourdieu terms the
classes populaires, have adapted to the situation of semi-poverty, and
have contracted the habit of buying and liking practical, functional
clothing and furniture, consumer objects which make much "effect",
so that one gets much for one’s money; also, they like food which is
nutritional, contains many calories, resulting in a bodily habitus
different from the habitus of the well off.
This aesthetics of everyday consumption is deeply realist, and may
seem to be Marxist. The conference paper on the official aesthetics of
the GDR3 fits well into Bourdieu´s description. But it is far away from
the young Marx´s descriptions of joyful, sensuous consumption of a
non-alienated human being. The consumption habitus of the
dominated classes is deeply marked by resignation.
I may add that functionalist urbanism can be understood as a realist,
and resigned, reaction. Taking as its point of departure a dire necessity
- to amend the "chaotic" situation of Western towns and cities - its
will restrict itself to what is effective and functional, letting ‘form
follow function’, rejecting luxurious forms and ornamentation as
superfluous, as something the wage labour classes cannot afford.
Bourdieu´s research is directed against liberal economiists’ way of
dealing with consumption. They presuppose consumers with varying
purchasing power, but with by and large the same perspective on the
world. If the consumption patterns differ, this must simply be referred
to the fact that those with little money must be content with cheaper
commodities than the well-off. This strengthens the image of mass
society, as opposed to a class society. The mass has homogeneous
preferences, even if their consumption habits are heterogeneous.
Consumption behaviour confirms the structure of the political system,
where political parties appear, or sell themselves, as mass parties.
3
By Milene Veenis, Amsterdam School for Social Science Research: Consumption in
East Germany: The Seduction and Betrayal of Things.
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Types of consumption – varieties of the aesthetic
Bourdieu makes an astonishingly strong case for the existence of a
class-structured consumption pattern. Class society still persists within
life-styles; one´s class situation conditions one´s perceptions and
desires; moreover, different consumption patterns do not just co-exist,
they make a field of class oppositions, where - at least in France - the
dominant classes distinguish themselves from other classes in an
oppressive, intimidating way. To avoid over-simplifying matters, it
must be mentioned that Bourdieu also describes a middle class with
its own, specific habitus, nervous, eager to cultivate itself, with a
liking for educational toys, scientifically recommended food,
aerobics, search for identity. This consumption pattern expresses an
aesthetic of aspiration and ambition.
These investigations have given an impetus to similar consumption
research in other countries, such as Norway. Norway differs from
France by having a much stronger popular culture, owing to the
progress made the last century by the peasant movement and the
labour movement.This makes identical results with those of France
improbable. Nevertheless, the same research techniques show that the
consumption field in Norway may be class-structured to a certain
degree.
When one´s habitus no longer accords with one´s purchasing
possibilities and real position in the economic field, this calls forth,
according to Bourdieu, what he terms a don Quichote effect, an effect
which, by the way, strongly reminds of Durkheimian anomie . The
situation is one of bewilderment. What happens? One of the
conference papers, that of Lehtonen, deals with this issue4. It appears,
as I read the paper, that financially ruined people in Finland,
participating in a public help program, do not behave like don
4
Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen, Dept of Sociology, Univ of Helsinki: Any room for aesthetics?
Heavily indebted consumers’ shopping practices.
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Sosiologisk årbok 1999.1
Quichote, but project
various, new consumer habits, and,
consequently, new aesthetic attitudes.
Leaving Bourdieu, the idealist aesthetic may be particularly important
for marketing and purchasing behaviour. Advertising creates an
imaginary world, just the way idealist art is an imaginary world. The
futility or disappointment of consumption itself may be traced back to
the gap between the imaginary and the real, so essential to idealist
aesthetic.
3. Varieties of the aesthetic II: The aesthetics of semiology and selfreferentiality
But there is also a different
aesthetic, derived not from our
sensibility and taste, but from the semiotic dimension of human
existence. This aesthetics has not been elaborated by a great
systematic thinker like Kant, but has emerged through the
contributions of many thinkers - notably Barthes and Baudrillard and social scientists like Lévi-Strauss or, in Scandinavia, Tom Broch,
all of whom have been deeply impressed by structural linguistics. (In
fact, this semiotic aesthetics is also present in the work of Bourdieu,
giving it a certain ambiguity.)
A non-expert rendition of structural linguistics could go like this:
Language is a system of internal relations, its constituents or elements
are systemic, that is, they refer to, get their meaning from, each other.
Language should not be studied in relation to a non-lingual reality, but
as a reality sui generis. This is the connection between Durkheim and
Saussure. This lingual reality is constituted by sounds, words, and
articulations, which each and all refer to other sounds, words and
articulations, as a system of distinctive oppositions, both in a
paradigmatic and in a syntagmatic way. Relations are everything, the
phonetic substrate is nothing. Therefore, the word as such is arbitrary
in relation to its denoting function or other functions.
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Types of consumption – varieties of the aesthetic
Transposed to the domain of aesthetics, the field of experience is
interpreted as structured like a language. The meaning of a piece of art
is constituted by its relation to other works of art, with which it makes
an internal system. The meaning of a piece of cake is constituted by its
relation to other pieces of edible substance, and to the non-edible.
Bread is opposed to wafers, to Indian “bread”; meat stands in a
distinctive opposition to fish, to fowl; wine in a distinctive opposition
to plain water, cola drinks, tea and coffee etc. Dongery clothing are
opposed to cord, to wool, to leather; t-shirts to shirts with long arms
and a collar, the mini-skirt to skirts of greater width (?) and length ,
the long-haired to those with a short hair cut etc.
Further, in these aesthetic internal systems, relations are everything,
while the stuff or substance has no other significance than being a
mere material support or substrate. Our aesthetic experiences are
wholly relational, each aesthetic object is as such arbitrary, in parallel
to the Saussureian dictum, that the sign is arbitrary. Thus, the lemon its yellowness, sourness - the lemon does not mean anything in itself,
its meaning or signification derives from its position within a system
of other fruits, such as the orange, the pine-apple etc. Pasta and red
wine have an entirely different meaning within an Italian context or
food system than within a Norwegian. Objects of consumption change
their meaning according to the consumption code into which they
enter. In the extreme case objects of consumption function as mere
signs, as the trade mark or logo, the small crocodile of La Coste, the
Levis mark, distinguishing between clothing which may otherwise be
nearly indistinguishable. They function as markers which themselves
unceasingly change their material substrate.
This is one of the meanings of fashion. Fashion makes us understand
that the objects and ways of consumption are arbitrary: What is chic,
smart, beautiful this year may not be so next year. Fashion is in itself
and is conducive to reflexivity; it trains the capacity to read signs and
their changing meanings and contexts. Reflexivity makes for
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Sosiologisk årbok 1999.1
experience of the world´s contingency - whatever is, could be
otherwise. Our taste is wholly contingent. Nothing is pleasant or
beautiful as such, it all depends on codes and contexts.
This semiotic or semiological aesthetic doctrine lends itself to social
and sociological interpretations. Consumption can be interpreted as a
move in a strategic game or a struggle between social groups, strata
or classes - a game where the rules undergo changes all the time. What
is at stake, what the struggle is about, is power or prestige, and the
power constellation between social groups and strata. The
economically dominant strata impose a consumption code as
hegemonic, and at the same time seek to restrict the access to the
consumption valued by this code. Commodity prices are made
forbidding for the overwhelming majority of consumers, who must
content themselves with cheaper products and logos. Consumption is a
sign of wealth and power, and in return may help improve the
consumer´s economic or political position. Life style is itself a
strategy in this struggle field.
This synchronic system of semiotic consumption, or consumption of
signs, is doubled by a diachronic system. The enjoyment and purchase
of art objects and performances are fully intelligible only with
reference to the art of the past; some knowledge of the history of
painting is a precondition for the valuation of art today; the same goes
for music: Recent music refers implicitly or explicitly to classical
music, through imitation, development and quotations, so do dance
and ballet. Again, there is an analogy with language. Art can be seen
as a self-referential system, a work of art refers not to an extra-artistic
reality, but to other works of art, just as a noun refers to other nouns
to make an internal phonetic system. Or more carefully: Art may
refer to something other than itself, but there is a marked tendency for
art to become a closed, self-referential system.
This tendency is discernible also outside the field of artistic objects in architecture and design of furniture, utensils and clothes. Fashion
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Types of consumption – varieties of the aesthetic
often, or perhaps always, presents itself as a neo-style. Neo-classisism,
neo-dada, neo-1950´ies, neo-victorianism, neo-colonial, neo-regional
style etc. The past style reappears with a small, subtle alteration,
intelligible only to those who know the history of style. Consumption
becomes a cognitive matter, it becomes intellectualized.
The entire field of consumption, then, appears dominated by an
aesthetics of signs - as opposed to an aesthetics of aisthesis, of what is
sensed and perceived, of stuff and substance, of taste and smell, of the
tactile and the optic. It is an intellectualized aesthetics, in contrast to a
materialistic aesthetics, but also to an idealist aesthetics of the Platonic
good-and-beautiful, the kalagathon.
Baudrillard laboured this point in some early works, as his books La
societé de consommation and Le système des objets. Consumption in
advanced or late capitalist economies, he asserted, is not really about
the use and consummation of artefacts, food and beverages. On the
contrary, no need satisfaction and the like take place; what is going
on, is an exchange of signs within an economy of exchange values,
surplus value and capitalization. The sign must be understood as a
peculiar type of commodities, and conversely: Commodities function
as sign systems, each commodity-sign circulates within the system,
thereby constituting an ideological apparatus in the Marxian sense of
Althusser.
More recently, Scott Lash has dealt with the present cultural situation
from a semiological or semiotic standpoint. He maintains that the
notion of postmodernity has a definite, and limited validity. It does
not apply to society as a whole, as the totality of institutions and
social processes; thus, the economy is still modern, not postmodern.
But the field of culture has, he asserts, undergone a very important
change. Cultural products and symbols less and less refer to a noncultural reality or, if you like, an non-cultural ontic region. Since
modernity is realist, present culture shows strong postmodern
tendencies. Therefore, realism is no longer the dominant cultural form
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or scheme of interpretation. Instead, cultural products, activities and
signs refer to and get their significance from other cultural products
and activities, signs. The omnipresence of mass-media, especially
television and videos, is conducive to this change towards selfreferentiality. The TV-spectator does not observe reality, but an
interpretation of reality, a mise en scène, a staging of real happenings.
This goes for the newspaper reader, too, but for several reasons, the
interpretative character of the TV is more readily apprehended. But if
mass-media literally mediate, that is, alter what they convey, then the
global, world-wide culture is experienced as an interpretation. Is, for
instance, Michael Jackson a real personality, and is this possibly real
person important, compared to his image ? As I have shown recently,
the same goes for Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir: The image of Sartre
and Simone in mass mediated culture differs markedly from the
allegedly real Parisian couple in post-war France. But what is real?
Can the difference beteen the image and the real be upheld? This destabilisation of reality, as Scott Lash puts it, is accelerated by the fact
that mass-media refer to each other, TV to the press, and vice versa.
Add to this how for example the T-shirts have printed copies of van
Gogh´s yellow meadow, or Munch´s Scream of anguish, or how the
computer plays Bachian preludes to mark the beginning or end of a
game, and one can be tempted to assent to Scott Lash´s thesis - that
culture is turning into a closed, self-referential system of icons and
other signs. From this, Scott Lash draws the conclusion that the labour
movement faces a challenge: Since working- class culture has been
predominantly realist, a postmodern culture calls for new ways of
organising labour culture.
The paper on Kafka and Prague presented at this conference5 seems to
corroborate this semiotic aesthetics: The image of Kafka is sold and
propagated by the tourist industry of capitalist Chechia, on all levels,
as souvenirs, T-shirts, as tourist walks, so as to form a circuit of signs.
5
Maruska Svasek, Amsterdam School for Social Science Research: Kafka-kitch and
Billboard Art. Commodifying the Aesthetic/Aestheticising Commodities in PostCommunist Prague.
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Types of consumption – varieties of the aesthetic
Another case is the semiotization of Hemingway in Havana: His
living-place, his bar, his favourite drink are part of the growing tourist
industry in Cuba.
4.Varieties of the aesthetic III: The vitalist problematic
Kantian idealist aesthetics - and its perversion or distortion through
the field of social distinctions - may still hold the sway as the
hegemonic attitude towards art and the artistic. But there is a different
attitude which has grown in importance the last hundred years - an
aesthetics of vitality and intensity, counting among its its early
proponents the philosopher-sociologist Georg Simmel.
Vitalist philosophy arose in the 19th century as a response to the
mechanisation of social life; Le mort saisit le vif. Ever wider fields of
human activity became mediated by mechanical devices. This implied
a tremendous increase in effectivity and productivity, but also a
certain reification of the human body itself and of the flow of social
intercourse. To compensate for this one could make much of the
spiritual dimension of human existence, and emphasise the spirit over
against the body. But one could also insist on the difference between
the living organism and inert matter. While inert matter is dealt with
by the science of mechanics, biology ´s topic is life as self-preserving,
self-developing, desiring systems. Living organisms respond to
differences, and are dependent on differences of stimuli. The
monotonous is harmful to the organism, to life in general. The
organism is a system of tensions and intensities, varying in degree. A
degree of intensity is always a difference of degree. When differences
are annulled, the living organism is threatened. The human being
experiences extinction of differences as boredom. Vitality connotes
great tensions and great internal differences, connotes intensity.
Another early vitalist, G.B.Shaw, said he did not want to be happy,
but active and alive, that is vital. He thought of happiness as a state of
equilibrium, as differences levelled out, as an idyllic pastoral.
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Simmel´s interpretation of urbanity is vitalist. There is a dialectic
between intensity and the monotonous, between differentials and the
undifferentiated. Man, wrote Simmel, is a being of difference, he/she
responds to differential stimuli. The great attraction of the metropolis
is that it offers endless possibilities of the new and unexpected;
compared to the quiet or sleepy life of the small town or the village,
metropolitan life is extremely intense and vital. But the opposite is
also true: In order for large scale urban life to function, it must be
mechanized and routinized to a considerable extent. Mechanical clock
time governs metropolitan life, compelling every citizen to reckon
with seconds and minutes, thereby suppressing the inner
consciousness of time (Husserl) or the durée (Bergson), constituted
by a flux of intense, interpenetrated experiences which defy measuring
and quantification. The urban dweller must somehow cope with this
dialectic between the intensive and the merely extensive, between
vitality and reification, between on the one hand the stimulating and
exciting, and on the other hand, the predictable and boring. Too much
stimulation is also harmful to one´s vitality. To protect against overstimulation the urban dwellers must take on an outer appearance as
blasé. To compensate for this, they create spheres of intimacy where
intense social relationships can be cultivated. Here, one can respond to
tiny differentials, a glance, a shrugging, the timbre of the voice.
The monetarisation of metropolitan life is in itself levelling. Money
quantifies qualitative differences, reduces them to the monotony of
more or less. An amount of money is not itself an intensive
magnitude. The dialectic between the intensive and the extensive is
itself of great intensity in great cities, compared to small cities and the
country-side. The urban dwellers run the risk of succumbing to all the
mechanisms of the big agglomeration, making them feel mechanical
and as it were dead; but at the same time they may achieve a
maximum of intensity, life on a high level, differentiated and multiple.
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Types of consumption – varieties of the aesthetic
The aesthetics of intensity can account for much of modern art, as
institutionalised in art galleries, museums and artist organisations,
public grants and university courses. Strawinski´s Rite of Spring from
1910 was an early example. It contained passages of hitherto unheard
harshness and ugliness, as the composer Lalo noted at the time. But
this objection could not really detract from its artistic value.
Expressionism is also a strongly vitalist movement, even if it may be
concerned with death and despair. Munch´s paintings express his
gloomy mood in a most intense way, so does the early works of
Schönberg, such as his Gurrelieder or the Pierrot Lunaire. Jazz in the
"roaring twenties" came as a movement of intensification, as
contrasted with the overly disciplined and controlled ways of musical
listening and performance of the Establishment. In our days, the
paintings of Francis Bacon could stand as a highly intense art or an
art of intensity. But above all , the aesthetics of vitality can account
for the culture of rock and pop and much of the ordinary, everyday
consumer cultural pattern. Rock - as a Norwegian philosopher and
rock musician (Sigurd Ohrem) has said - is the opposite of leaning
one-self back(wards) in self-complacency. Rock is not about beauty in
the idealist sense, it is not about beauty in any sense. It is noisy,
violent, harsh and the like - it is an anti-image of the smooth
functioning of offices and bureaucracies. Boredom haunts the wellplanned world of bureaucracy, differences are levelled, the unpleasant
is banned - no smells, no smoke, no shrills, no screaming and
shouting, no sobbing or excessive laughter. Rock is the counter-image
of this polite and polished way of life; it is intentionally ugly, rough
and bad-mannered, and this goes - a fortiori - for the punk style, for
rapping, the Caribian reggae and so on.
Childhood and adolescence are as a rule more intense than later stages
of life. Therefore, there is affinity between youth and rock culture, a
fact which does not exclude grown-ups and the ageing from
participating.
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The aesthetics of intensity influences and materialises itself in lifestyle and clothing fashions - the bizarre, the shocking, the wild and
barbarian, the ‘anything goes’. One can be anything one fancies, if
only one is intense. One must explore and exploit the differentials of
tastes and colours and shapes, as a perpetual fight against the entropy
of social life, the levelling of differences towards the routine-like.
Therefore, our daily life and sphere of consumption has not become
more beautiful over the decades. If I compare photographs from the
50ies and 60ies of urban life with what I see today, there is no
progress towards beauty. One may try to impute this to the recent
tendencies of misery called forth by a less tempered capitalist
economy - the poor, the homeless, the junkies, the beggars are part of
the city-scape, and seemingly have come to stay. But this is not the
whole story. The truth is that even the well-adapted and well
integrated parts of the population do not pursue the ideal of beauty as
much as before; they pursue intensity. Therefore, even the well-off
can dress outrageously. To give one example: Wearing dongery jeans
and an expensive fur coat would have been unthinkable 30 years ago,
to say nothing of bearing a rucksack upon the fur coat. The rucksack
and the fur coat belong to different codes of dressing, the one
belonging to out-door sporting life, the other to high-life. But today
they are mixed, creating a dissonance. So what? Modern art is
strongly concerned with all kinds of dissonance, so why should not
modern consumption be?
Likewise, in matters of food, the situation is one of cacophony, with a
marked tendency towards the intense. The Mexican way is
fashionable, and also the kitchen of the Orient, with their strongly
spiced dishes. A Swedish sociologist, Sten Andersson6, has noted that
meat balls in Scandinavia connotes the safe existence of one’s
6
Matens roller, (trans. The roles of food) orig. Almqvist & Wicksell 1980, Norw. trans
1983, University press.
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Types of consumption – varieties of the aesthetic
childhood, while a burger connotes freedom – that is, exciting
possibilities for an intense life.
The aesthetic connected to bodily health can be seen as a variation of
the vitality theme. Good health, one must believe, makes one more
vital. On the other hand, overly concern with health - have I got
enough sleep, can I eat this or that - may lower one´s vitality, turning
into an unexciting worry about one´s expectancy for reaching the age
of 80. So, perhaps the recent aesthetic of health is a new, postmodern
aesthetic, also, because it blurs the distinction between the ethical and
the aesthetic. Consumption has become at the same time a matter of
the senses and of morals.
5. Concluding remarks
Consumption is a vast topic, its relation to aesthetics is only one
aspect. To concentrate on this aspect does not mean that other aspects
are unimportant. I am thinking of the great questions of distribution,
of compensatory consumption and of the Unreason of a society geared
onto the consumption patterns we experience today. But the study of
aesthetics and consumption may shed new light on these topics.
The various forms of aesthetic attitude I have sketched are conflicting
perspectives, with an affinity to other kinds of social and political
conflicts.
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The dominating type of aesthetic is, I believe, after all, still the Idealist
one, institutionalised in countless ways. The functionalist,
instrumental aesthetic is another important trend, especially within
architecture. The semiotic and vitalist aesthetics may be increasingly
important. The various forms of aesthetic attitude I have sketched are
conflicting perspectives, giving rise to conflicting policies of
consumption, with affinity to other social and political conflicts.
Reflecting on this diversity may help clarify research within this
domain.
17